Continuing our theme of book-burning and censorship from Fahrenheit 451, I wanted to examine historical Nazi book burnings and the work that we lost--and the implications of that loss.
Book burnings were an effort to ensure German arts and culture agreed with Nazi ideals (a process called Gleichschtaltung, meaning “coordination” in English). It was largely practiced by German university students, who pillaged public and university libraries for “un-German books”, and then burned their spoils in a great, ceremonial fashion. This included live music and reading “fire oaths”, which detailed why, according to the Nazis, the books deserved their fiery fates.
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| A black and white photograph depicting a SA member throwing books into a fire |
The picture above is dated May 10, 1933, and depicts one such book burning on the Opernplatz (a public square) in Berlin. Though indiscernible from one photograph, this event saw over 25,000 books burned to a crowd of 40,000 people. Previously in the year, the Nazi German Student Association’s Main Office for Press and Propaganda called for a nationwide “Action against the Un-German Spirit”, which urged local university chapters to organize blacklists of “un-German” authors, sponsor Nazi public figures to speak publicly, and organize radio broadcasts. This culminated in an outline of what “pure” national German language and culture looked like via the 12 “theses” (a reference to Martin Luther’s 95 Theses), which advocated for “pure” German language and culture (including literature), for universities as a bastion of German nationalism, and against “Jewish intellectualism”. This provided the blueprint for the burnings.
Among those books burned were How I Became a Socialist by Helen Keller, a blind and deaf author who advocated for women’s suffrage and rights for industrial workers and people with disabilities; Jack London’s The Iron Heel, which depicted a Socialist hero freeing a fascist America; the Jewish author Stefan Zweig’s anti-war tragedy Jeremias, which he wrote in the wake of WWI; and, perhaps most notably, the archives of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute of Sexology)--a private research institution founded and led by Magnus Hirschfeld--which consisted of as many as 20,000 books and journals about sex and eroticism, same-sex love, and transgender identity. In addition to its library, the Institut offered housing, counseling, and medical services, including the first modern gender affirmation surgeries in the 1930s.
In addition to destroying the Institut’s library (and, by 1944, repurposing the building itself into a Nazi office), its list of names and addresses were seized and likely used to aid Hitler’s purge of gay men during The Night of Long Knives in 1934.
Though a few surviving documents are preserved in LGBTQ and Sexology archives in California and Berlin, the vast majority were lost forever, setting LGBTQ research--and particularly transgender research--back by decades.
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| A photo of Dora Richter |
We often hear the sentiment (even from well-intentioned, progressive people) that being transgender is a relatively new, even trendy, phenomenon. But this isn’t accurate. Dora Richter (1891-1933) received MTF gender confirmation surgeries in 1922 and 1931, and, though she was the first known person to receive a vaginoplasty, she was one of many transgender people under the Institut. And of course, transgender history goes back much further than the 20s--it’s as old as human history, recorded as early as the Neolithic and Bronze Age--but the point remains: the Nazis destroyed historic research on transgender identity and medicine, which skewed our modern understanding of transgender people. What would trans rights, trans medicine, trans communities, trans-inclusive education look like if this research survived? And how do we handle the fact that we can’t know the answer?
Helen Keller wrote a letter to the German students who burned her work, which was published in the New York Times in May of 1933:
History has taught you nothing if you think you can kill ideas. Tyrants have tried to do that often before, and the ideas have risen up in their might and destroyed them.You can burn my books and the books of the best minds in Europe, but the ideas in them have seeped through a million channels and will continue to quicken other minds
I should really research more about LGBT history, because everytime something about it is mentioned I learn something completely new (which is probably exactly the point you're getting at in this post).
ReplyDeleteI think it's interesting to compare the idea of inclusive history to those who advocate for "patriotic" education, which would no doubt remove LGBT representation and only include the big names of POC and women throughout history. Leftists are often criticized of trying to make everything gay and non-white today, but the main reason this is a complaint is because the history of these people has been censored from the public. As you said, identities such as transgender have existed for a long time, but through a censorship of history they aren't represented in full, which is dangerous considering they do indeed make up a good portion of our population. Good post!
I feel like the times would be drastically different if books were NOT burned. I feel like the LGBTQ community would be accepted and more renowned. People should be able to live as themselves! If we had that knowledge of books and research back in the 20s, that means this 'form' of identity is not new nor is it a fad. I honestly feel like the world would be in a much more compassionate state now if information was not burned away, and as you said, set back by decades. People just cannot accept others that are different from them. Jesus accepted everyone and follows of him should do so as well. That does not mean they have to change their beliefs in God and lives as believers, but a change in attitude wouldn't hurt! Nice work!
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